AACTE will host a free webinar on principal leadership on Wednesday, November 28, from 3:00-4:00 p.m. EST. Please tune in to attend the Supporting Novice Principals on the Job: Mentoring Support in Difficult Situations webinar, part of a series on principal leadership sponsored by The Wallace Foundation.

Northwest Missouri State University was presented with the Christa McAuliffe Excellence in Teacher Education Award by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) at the opening session of its Annual Meeting last month in Washington, D.C. The award is named in honor of Christa McAuliffe, a teacher who was killed in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, and honors institutions for excellence and innovation.

Recipients of the award have shown evidence of top-level administrative support, alignment with its institutional mission and strategic agenda, contributions to significant institutional improvements or programming, research, and incorporated best practices.

AACTE member H. Richard (Rich) Milner, IV, a leading scholar of urban education and teacher education, recently delivered the 15th Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research sponsored by the American Educational Research Association. The Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research is designed to feature the important role of research in advancing understanding of equality and equity in education. Each year, a distinguished scholar notable for producing significant research related to equality in education is invited to give a public lecture in Washington, D.C.

Milner is currently the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Education and professor of education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. His lecture, “Disrupting Punitive Practices and Policies: Rac(e)ing Back to Teaching, Teacher Preparation, and Brown,” focused on research on the practices and policies that implicitly or overtly punish rather than support the development of students of color.

The Colorado Department of Higher Education announced this month that it has awarded nearly $2 million to 17 collaborative projects designed to recruit and retain more educators as part of the Plan Into Action grant established in partnership with the Colorado Center for Rural Education. Of the recipients, nine are AACTE member institutions, which have developed initiatives to combat teacher shortages. The other grantees include school districts, boards of cooperative educational services, and traditional and alternative educator training programs from across the state. The projects will establish teacher residency programs, leverage technology for improved professional support, and encourage more teacher candidates to specialize in high-need content areas.

“Teachers are the backbone of our education system and critical to our state’s long-term success,” CDHE executive director Dan Baer said. “These funds will strengthen the relationships among our institutions, alternative programs and the schools in their backyard, helping communities cultivate their own teacher corps and better support those already in the classroom.”

AACTE members Vanessa Anton and Barbara Fuller of Northeastern State University’s (NSU) College of Education were recently featured on the EduTalk radio show to highlight their Robotics Academy of Critical Engagement (R.A.C.E.) program, which won the 2018 AACTE Best Practice Award for the Innovative Use of Technology. During the interview, Anton and Fuller shared that NSU’s R.A.C.E. program is the only one of its kind housed in a college of education in the U.S. and around the world.

After a successful pilot of the program, NSU opened its first robotics lab in 2012 on its Tahlequah campus, followed by a second lab on its Broken Arrow campus—which both have educator preparation programs. Every pre-service teacher at NSU is required to take an emerging technologies course that includes the robotics unit where the candidates build and program their own robot. The course prepares teacher candidates of every subject to enter the classroom ready to use robotics as part of their curriculum if they choose to do so. Most importantly, the process of learning how to work together well and improve critical thinking provides a gateway for the candidates to teach those same skills to their students.

Meeting the demands of a career and home life can be challenging, especially when the job is school administration. Join us as we discuss how demanding responsibilities test new leaders’ ability to unplug from the school world. AACTE will host a free webinar on principal leadership on Wednesday, October 24, from 3:00-4:00 p.m. EDT. Please tune in to attend the Supporting Novice Principals on the Job: Balancing Work Home Life webinar, part of a series on principal leadership sponsored by The Wallace Foundation.

This fall, AACTE will present a new webinar series called “Supporting Novice Principals on the Job,” supported by The Wallace Foundation as part of the Association’s ongoing partnership to disseminate the latest research and practice innovations in principal preparation. As moderators of the four webinars, we will explore the day-to-day work of a principal and how principal preparation programs can collaborate with districts to support new leaders.

The webinar series builds on the Wallace Foundation’s Theme from the Field that highlights the need for realistic clinical experiences in quality preparation programs. The webinars can be used to provide clinical expertise to principal preparation programs and to support new principals’ induction programs. The conversations will provide critical, timely information for pre-service principals, novice administrators, and university faculty who teach in principal preparation programs. If you are involved in school leadership, please join us!

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has released the first public draft of its position statement on “Professional Standards and Competencies for Early Childhood Educators.” Feedback from AACTE members—schools, colleges, and departments of education that house many early childhood degree programs—about the content and clarity of the statement is critical! We encourage you to provide feedback through this survey.

This statement is a revision of the 2009 position statement on “NAEYC Standards for Early Childhood Professional Preparation,” which is a cornerstone of the early childhood profession. It serves as the standards for NAEYC’s higher education accreditation system, as well as the standards for the NAEYC SPA recognition system through the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). It also influences states’ early childhood competencies and professional development systems and informs the program content and design of most early childhood degree programs (preparing an early childhood workforce that serves young children, birth through age eight).

This article originally appeared in UCLA Ed & IS online magazine, Ampersand, and is reposted with permission.

CTS joins with Orange County and Butte County to expand California’s Multi-Tiered System of Support for educators and school systems.

In recent years, California has greatly reduced the number of student suspensions. Between the 2011-12 and 2016-17, the number of suspensions each year dropped by nearly half, from about 710,000 to a little over 381,000 students.